Topic: POLL: How do you found out about bitcoin? (Read 3111 times)

I don't really remember how I found out about it. I think it was from a friend.

i found out bitcoin on a download website..
first, i just thought i've had to left the bitcoin client open and them i got millions of bitcoins,but it wasnt just like that.so i give up for a few months.

then, one day i was looking at lulzsec  profile at twiiter and then i saw a weird combination of number and letters.then i figured out it was bitcoins and found out the mining software

I read about the Bitcoin virus for Mac on an RSS feed.

Took an 8000-level graduate crypto class for no particular reason.  The professor mentioned it but scoffed, and I was intrigued.  A few months later I randomly found myself working as an ATM technician and hating not only the central control of banks' payment systems but also the gross inefficiencies of them.  Came here and started reading.

IT friend of mine brought it up in early 2011 I think it was and then Corbettreport.com talked about it as well in early 2011. I looked into it but didn't see me making much money in it when looking at electricity vs coins made with the hardware I had at the time. Then just last week that same IT friend of mine said he could get away with running some computers at his work meaning free electricity so now I'm hunting for ATI cards locally.

I found Bitcoin well before the first bubble. I tried the software, but gave up without mining any low-difficulty bitcoins. I just didn't go into the details enough to find out if Bitcoin was legit or not, and the IRC server connection it made to find peers was shady in my opinion. I knew about many malicious botnets functioning through IRC servers, and thought that maybe Bitcoin was just a voluntary botnet, masked as a useless virtual money software to hide the real traffic.

Then I found it again a long time later, when the price was about $30, and only got to sell my first bitcoin at that price.

I was actually just reading about peer-to-peer networking on wikipedia, and an article had bitcoin listed under the "Related Articles" section.

found out about it from a friend during its bubble summer phase. looked at the charts and decided quite obviously not to get in at that point and wait for it to correct itself. I'm glad it did in a beautiful channel downward until this winter when it broke out of it forcing my hand to buy in at 3.2 and I've been enjoying the ride ever since.

Same here.

i found out about bitcoin through the silkroad news. I thought to myself "if drug dealers are accepting this instead of cash then it must be serious"

I read an article on wired sometime ago, and from then I have been trading btc.

I found out mid 2011.  I'm a World of Warcraft mod developer and while browsing an add-on site I saw in someone's signature that they were accepting bitcoin donations.  Google'd it and went from there.

 From a friend. He runs a small comp shop. Started yesterday.

I was big into HYIPs and e-gold a little while back. The outcome of that adventure... well, what do you think? HYIPs are scams. I was a sucker.

But the concept was intriguing. I was making money (or i thought i was) starting from just a few cents by clicking ads. It felt great to see this happening.

E-gold had one weakness however; it was vulnerable to attack by a hostile government. Sure enough, Babylon didn't like the "money laundering" side of it. This is also known as, Uncle Sam wasn't getting his cut.

A few years back, there was a warrant, a court case, an audit and a ruling. E-gold was to be liquidated by order of the government.

I was pissed. I only had something like 14 cents in my account, but I told myself I would discover a new way to move money around; a way with plausible deniability for everyone involved. You're damn right, I want the crooks to get away with it. There is so much unnecessary violent crime in the world simply because there is such a thing as victimless crime. If nobody had to be silenced because they knew about the meth lab, that would be one less murder. I do not do drugs or engage in any illegal activity. It is a matter of principle. The government is too large and too powerful, and unless Ron Paul is elected and lives long enough to do what he has to do, it will only get worse.

I kept searching for an alternative currency. I don't remember how or when, but I found Bitcoin. Thought it was weird at first, "How could this ever work?", that sort of thing. Watched it for a while, downloaded the wallet, used the Bitcoin faucet... and forgot about it for a year or so. Missed the big bubble-- probably a good thing; that would have solidified my skepticism. I built myself a gaming rig, long overdue, and started running F@H with the wasted cycles at night. It was interesting of course, but I didn't see anything come from it.

Then I remembered that Bitcoin thing. And that if GPU's were superior at crunching numbers one way.... well... I could be rich!

...  Not rich yet. But I am making about 1.20 BTC a week!

Can't remember exactly how I came across it first, but I think I was reading up on some stuff about Evan Ratliff and digital anonymity. I kind of forgot about it until a few months ago. Now of course I wished I had invested a few bucks in it when I had had the chance.

I was in the cab of my garbage truck reading a finances magazine I had found, and saw an article on bitcoin. I did my research, and decided, what have i got to lose. I still have that magazine somewhere, Ill edit post when I find it

What authentication system?

Think of cash: people give you coins and bills. 100 cents ocuppy much more than one dollar. The same applies with bitcoin transactions: you recollect previous transactions to you and send them into new addresses. Sometimes you send more money than you want to send (like when you pay with a bill), the remaining (the "change") is sent to yourself.

The size of a transaction is proportional to the number of "coins" (independently of the value) and the number of outputs (usually one or two if there's change). If you pay with 100 cents instead with a dollar bill, you pay more fees. That transaction becames a new "coin" for the recipient to use.

I got into bitcoin last year, took some time off and got interested when we broke $5 again.  This authentication system is stupid.

the fees are based on the transaction size in Kbytes
The BTC you have in your wallet can either be:
1)from a single transaction and stored in a single wallet
2) from multiple transactions - potentially stored in multpile wallets (and currently the gui won't show you that - it will only display the total)
in the first case when you want to make a payment the transaction block will have 1 input - your wallet and 1 output - who ever you are paying to
in the second case the transaction must include all of the sources for the funds you are trying to move - sot it will contain more input addresses and thus take more bytes

(and i think on the age of the transactions matters as well- the older the inputs are the cheaper it gets)